For The Love of Travel

The Łazienki (Bath) Park and Palace complex lies in Warsaw’s central district on an avenue that is part of the “Royal Route”, linking the Royal Castle with Wilanow Palace to the south.  Its Warsaw’s largest park, occupying over 76 hectares of the city centre. 

From 1674 the property belonged to Count Stanislaw Lubomirski, (note  coat of arms without a cross!) , who built a Baroque bathhouse and richly decorated it with stuccos, statues, and paintings; some of the original decorations and architectural details survive.

In 1766 King Stanislaw Poniatowski purchased the estate and converted the bathing pavilion into a classicist summer residence, with pavilions, an amphitheatre for concerts; villas and monuments. The Palace was the scene  of the famous “Thursday dinners”, to which the King would invite scholars, writers and poets – Lazienki at that time was an important and flourishing cultural centre.

The Solomon Room is my favourite part of the Palace, amazing murals. Unfortunately a series of paintings that used to here, by Marcello Bacciarelli depicting the history of Solomon – with King Stanislaw as the biblical king :), were torched by the Germans in 1944.

In the 19thC, following the partitions of Poland, it fell into the hands of the Russian tsars, who erected new pavilions in the gardens. In 1918, it was officially designated as a public park.

During WW2, the occupying Germans drenched its walls with petrol and set the comlex on fire. They also drilled holes in the palace walls in preparation for blowing it up. They never got around to carrying out the planned destruction. Following WW2, an arduous reconstruction project of the complex commenced which lasted 2 decades.

First stop this morning to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which provides a tribute to those Warsaw residents who fought and died for an independent Poland. It sets the scene for the uprising by detailing the German and Russian invasion of Poland in September 1939; the development of the Polish underground resistance; the treachery of allies in not coming to assist Poles in the 1944 uprising until too late and later, in the Yalta agreement ‘settlement’; the viciousness of the German occupation and the decimation of utilities and infrastructure in Warsaw as a last act by Hitler, on abandoning the city in 1945.  Finally the Soviet era of occupation until 1989.

Saw an amazing 3D aerial view sequence, a simulation of an imaginary flight of a British Liberator bomber over the city after the war in 1945. It reconstructs the trajectory that RAF bombers took when bringing supplies and arms to the insurgency. The film was developed after the project team took a helicopter flight over contemporary Warsaw to film base material. They filled it in with detail from some 2000 historic pictures, films and paintings to recreate Warsaw. The result is a computer simulation that shows collapsed bridges along the Vistula river, whole districts of roofless, burned-out houses and the Warsaw ghetto as a flat sea of rubble – over 85% of the city in ruins. No longer “the Paris of the East”. Before the war, some 1.3 million lived in Warsaw, just 1,000 amid the ruins in 1945.

Next to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (POLIN). It presents 1000 years of Polish-Jewish co-existence, speaking of cooperation, rivalry and conflicts, autonomy, integration and assimilation.  It explores cultural stereotypes, xenophobia and nationalist prejudices.

An incredibly curated story from the Middle Ages; legends of arrival, settlement and development of culture – showing the social, religious and political diversity of Jews and highlighting dramatic events of the past. The story is told by artefacts, paintings, reconstructions and models, video projections and interactive installations – from the perspective of merchants, noblemen, kings, scholars, rabbis, housewives, politicians, revolutionaries. A beautiful replica of a 17thC, 15 metres high wooden synagogue in Gwodziec took my breath away at the centre of the exhibition.Polychromic decoration from the hexagonal space at the centre, with walls covered with painting from the floor to the ceiling. Decorations depicted religious scenes, animal imagery, plants, zodiac signs, Messianic symbols. 

I hadn’t appreciated the depth of the Lithuanian/Polish alliance, since 1300’s, even forming a confederation in 1567, sharing an elected king, foreign policy and single monetary system (and home to Europe’s largest Jewish community) . Their agreement was in response to the growing strength of and pressure for expansion from Russia and Sweden. This tapestry depicts the white eagle (emblem of Poland) and the knight on horseback (emblem of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), united by Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory.

This is a 1901 photo of some workers who boycotted a factory’s operation after 45 of their female colleagues had been sacked and replaced with Christian women. Calling a strike was seen as a radical action!

Mania Wilbuszewicz-Shochat (dark dress) was constantly asking herself “how can we achieve social justice”? Her stay in Palestine in 1904 convinced her to settle there, establishing the first kibbutz, a collective agricultural settlement based on socialist ideals.

I was interested to learn that Poland initially served as a haven for European jewry since the 1000’s because of its relative tolerance. However the history of pogroms (Jewish massacre) in Poland was the most confronting part of the exhibition for me – from the 1300’s on. Variously blamed for the Black Death; unfair competition in trade and crafts; declining economic conditions in different periods of history; associated with the Bolshevik revolution and Trotsky; and the Holocaust (85% of Polish jewry perished).

A day of sombre reflection…. on history of which I had little or no knowledge, remembering experiences and stories told by my parents as I walked through various exhibits in the 2 museums.